The Best American Travel Writing 2012 Read Free Page A

meanings—subject to vandalism. Hence “the acquired art of paying attention” is best served outside the marketplace—either by travelers of independent means, such as Richard Burton, or by travelers who control their own means of production, such as the daring train-hopper Aaron Dactyl, a portion of whose self-published magazine appears last in this book. Most of us do sell ourselves, and our work as published by the magazines shows the consequences. My feelings about this are well described by one of Timbuktu’s historians: “In my worst dreams, I see a rare text that I haven’t read being slowly eaten.” He, of course, is referring to bugs, not editors. You will meet him in Peter Gwin’s “The Telltale Scribes of Timbuktu,” which is perhaps the most traditionally Victorian of this year’s travel essays: carefully drawn, rich in anecdotes and observations, complete with romance (of a sad sort) and danger, and set in a locale that we might now call Orthodox Exotic.
    To the Victorians, Africa was still the Dark Continent and much of the planet remained unmapped. Nowadays we have gained the semblance of an acquaintance with most of it (excluding the oceans). But insightful travelers perpetually discover the gloriously and ominously unknown darkness of everywhere. When Henry Shukman visits the forbidden country around Chernobyl, he finds an astonishingly rapid alteration into something resembling the Zone in that Tarkovsky movie
Stalker.
Gray wolves and wild boar now roam “a place where the animals are mostly undisturbed, living amid a preindustrial number of humans and a post-apocalyptic amount of radioactive strontium and cesium.” Here too are albino birds, red-needled pine trees, and field mice that might be growing resistant to radiation. What if someday the science required to save us from our inevitable new atomic errors comes out of this place? Or what if Chernobyl proves that “moderate” nuclear accidents are worse than we can imagine?
    A natural companion to Shukman’s essay, Elliott D. Woods’s praiseworthy exposition of trash ecology—a topic that is getting ever more attention nowadays—brings us to the outskirts of Cairo, where “a haze produced by the exhalations of some 2,500 black-market recycling workshops carpets a landscape of windowless brick high-rises and unpaved alleys piled high with garbage.” The people who live and glean here are called zabaleen. It is unexpected—and heartening—to learn that “in sixty years, the zabaleen have gone from serfs to recycling entrepreneurs.” Unfortunately, they lack many rights. As a measure against swine flu, and perhaps “to appease Muslims whipped into a frenzy by the H1N1 scare,” the Egyptian government recently killed 300,000 garbage-eating pigs belonging to the zabaleen. All the same, Woods’s observations give cause for thought and hope combined. It seems to me that if governments and NGOs were to take note of this essay and encourage appropriate local manifestations of the profit motive to address this problem, then perhaps our future need not involve Soylent Green.
    Thomas Swick’s account of the group called Addiopizzo, which encourages business establishments not to pay Mafia extortionists, is equally worth reading, because it introduces us to brave people who stand up to evil. That Addiopizzo is necessary in an EU country in this day and age is rather shocking; that it may prove effective would be a still greater surprise. I was very impressed that thirty-five hundred of Palermo’s citizens summoned the courage to put themselves on public record that they gave their business to extortion-free bars, restaurants, and the like. At the site where gangsters murdered a man named Paolo Borsellino, a note quotes the victim: “The fight against the Mafia should be a cultural and moral movement that involves everyone, especially the